The Huguenot

Mary Sampson Stephens and the Refugees Who Built America

The Edict of Fontainebleau, 1685

To understand William’s wife Mary, you have to understand a religious catastrophe that happened in France nearly three centuries ago.

The Huguenots were French Protestants — followers of the Reformed Christian faith in a country whose monarchy was militantly Catholic. For nearly a century, they had lived under the protection of the Edict of Nantes, a 1598 law that granted them religious freedom. Then, on October 18, 1685, King Louis XIV revoked that protection entirely.

What followed was one of history’s great refugee crises. In the years surrounding the Edict of Fontainebleau, an estimated 400,000 Huguenots fled France — to England, the Netherlands, Prussia, South Africa, and the American colonies. They left behind property, businesses, and often family members they would never see again. They brought with them skills, faith, and a fierce attachment to the freedom they had been denied.

One of those refugees was Richard Sampson. He crossed the Atlantic and settled in colonial Virginia or the Carolinas. His descendants became the Sampson family — and one of them, Mary, married a Virginia frontier fighter named William Stephens.

The Huguenot exodus produced some of colonial America’s most distinguished families. The Faneuil family (whose patriarch built Faneuil Hall in Boston), Paul Revere’s father Apollos Rivoire, and the forebears of several U.S. Presidents all trace to the same 17th century French Protestant diaspora as Mary Sampson. Colonial American Heritage

Mary Sampson Stephens — At a Glance

Born: ~1715–1720, Virginia or Carolinas
Died: ~1780s, exact date unknown
Heritage: Descendant of Huguenot refugee Richard Sampson, fled France after 16851
Married: William Stephens, ~1740, Virginia
Children: 9 known: Alexander, Sampson, Richard, James, Daniel, William, Samuel, Louise, Ann
Jerry’s relation: Probable 6th great-grandmother — the Huguenot thread in the family bloodline

A Name That Survived the Centuries

We know that Mary’s Huguenot heritage was important to the Stephens family because of one simple fact: they named their son Sampson.

In an era when sons were typically named after fathers, grandfathers, or Biblical figures, giving a child his mother’s maiden name as a first name was a deliberate act of remembrance. The name Sampson Stephens, listed on that 1753 Virginia deed alongside his parents William and Mary, is a small monument — proof that the family knew where they came from and wanted to carry it forward.2

That Huguenot thread now runs through you, some 340 years after Richard Sampson first set foot in America.

Next: Chapter Three — The Battalion Man →